30 this town has got the hell beat out of it. Let's go from there." This year, as the Massell administra- tion came to the end of its four Vears in City Hall, the power structure once again had no real candidate of its own in the race for mayor. In fact, after the general election, in which eleven people sought the job, the choice was narrowed down to two men who had previously given the power structure the jitters: Sam Massell, the incumbent, and Maynard Jackson, the black vice- mayor, who had been busy for four years build- ing up a constituency for his projected entry into the mayoralty race, and had demonstrated little interest in treating the power structure any dif- ferently from other groups of concerned citizens. The runoff election was held October 16th, and, as almost everybody knows by now, Maynard Jackson wa5 elected mayor-the first black man to hold such a job not only in Atlanta but in any lna lor city in the South. Jackson, who is a thirty-five-year- old lawyer, collected about fifty-nine per cent of the 125,641 votes cast for mayor. (The current population of At- lanta is estimated at 479,900, fifty-four per cent of them black. Some 206,270 residents were eligible to vote, and about fifty-one per cent of thenz are white.) Blacks also captured a number of other positions; after all the votes Were counted, there were nine blacks and nine whites on the city council, and five blacks and four whites on the board of education. John Lewis, a bltck man who has been involved in the vot- ing-rights movement in the South for a decade, and who now runs the Voter Education Project in Atlanta, called the election "a dream deferred; the hopes of à lot of people COlne true." Prior to the general election, on October 2nd, the campaigning was relatively subdued. ./\11 the candidates seemed soberly concerned about the city's problems, which are sinli1ar to those of ahnost any other city: trans- portation, housing, education, uneln- ployment, and, especialh, crime. l\fter the general election, however, the tone of the campaign changed dramatical- ly. Jackson stayed with his previous theme-a fairly unflamboyant promise to provide the city with "a leader, not a politician," who would bring Atlan- tans of alJ stations into the mainstream of the city's life. But :\1assell, who had en joyed quite a liheral image during his màyor tlty, and long before he he- came mayor as well, suddenly stdrted campaigning on the slogan "Atlanta's Too Young to Die." What would cause the city's death, the incumhent said, would be the election of "a MàY- nard Jackson-Hosea Williams adminis- tration." Hosea \Villiams is a fiery black civil-rights activist, an old wal- horse from the school of demonstration and confrontation, who directs the .LL\t- lanta branch of the Southern Chnstian Leadership Conference, and who had announced late in the game that he was running for the position of city- council president. (In the new city charter, enacted this year, the name of the city's governing body was changed from "board of aldermen" to "city coun- cil," and that of the city's second-highest elective of- fi f ". " ce rom VICe-mavor to .I "city-council president.") Manv observers doubted whether V\Tilliams really wanted the job, and almost everyone, including Williams, was astonished when the results of the general election came in. \Villiams made the runoff, against a white councilman named \Vyche Fowler, a young màn regàrded dS be- ing on the way up in political circles. It is clear that Mavor Massell, in the last few weeks of the campaign, was seek- ing to trade on white voters' fears about Williams. Massell's advertisements con- tained lines such as these: "The thought of a Maynard Jackson-Hosea Williams .:ulministration is scaring some Atlan- tans to death. . . . If such a team t- teln pts to lead this city, man) blacks .1nd whites alike fear a new trend of flight from Atlanta. They fear an end to progress, an end to opportunity, an end to faith." This, according to one \vhite liberal who was incensed by the ad, could easily be translated to read, "If you don't vote for me, Hosea V\Til- Iiams is going to move next door to you and mclrry your sister." When some At- lantans complained that Massell's mes- sclges bordered on racism, and certainly were eXploiting the fears of whItes, Massell came hack with an ad headlined "lIE lOVES ATI AKTA so MUCH, HE'S Gar TI-IE Gl ì TS TO TELL THE TRlTTH." 'rhe truth, in the ad, had to do with Maynard Jackson and Hosea \Villialns. 'rhe two black candidates were, of course, not running as a team. 'I'hey wel e connected only by their blackness, and the voters were free to vote fOl one and against the other, and that is how they actually did vote. In fact, it looked very much as if Massell's strate- gy-to get out the frightened white vote and to get it for himself-had backfired. One dndlysis of the October I>ECEMDEI\ I, I 9 7 .3 16th voting patterns showed that eight- een per cent of the whites who voted cast their ballots for Maynard Jackson. Jackson also received ahout ninety-five per cent of the black vote. If this was insufficient proof that a lot of white Atlantans were not ,;wayed by quasi-racial appeals, more was evident in the race for president of the city council. Wyche Fowler won that one, over Hosea Williams, with about sixty-four per cent of the vote, and an analysis showed that Fowler, the white man, received something like thirt} per cent of the black vote On the day after the election, Atlantans black and white were congratulating themselves on having voted for the can- didate, not his color, and political writ- ers were guessing that, as David Nor- dan wrote in the Atlanta Journal, "it will be many a moon before another major political candidate base" a cam- paign for city-wide office in Atlanta on the subject of race." Mayor Massell, with two and a half months of his term remaining, said, "My only motive . . . waS to tell the truth," and then left for a brief vacation while Maynard J ack- son prepared to move into City Hall. Faced with an additional four years of less than favored status, Atlanta's power structure has not stàrted shop- ping around for another city to run. In- stead, it has gone through a period of self-Í1nposed change. Most of the lead- ers have accepted the fact that there is a new politics in Atlanta, and that they will have to learn to play by the new rules. rrhe lnost significant bit of evi- dence that this change has taken place, .:lccording to SOllle observel s, i" the fact that the power structure has allowed itself to become racially integrated, to a degree unprecedented in American cities. As a result, Atlanta probably stands a better chance today than any other city in the nation of heing able to cope with its problems effectively. T HAT a small group of husiness- men had the power to shc:lpe .i.L\t- ]anta clnd its future for so lnany years has traditIonally been a sore point with SOlne i\tLlntans-primarily the white and black libefclls, the people who staff and direct .the variety of civil-rights, civil-liberties, and human-relïtions or- ganizations that have their headquarters in AtLulta. But the fact of the nlatter is that largely because of Atlanta's power structure the city has a virtual]) new do\vntown business district (at a tinle when ,1 lot of other cities, includ- ing some that social scientists have proclaimed to be lacking in power structures, are still wrestling V\'ith downtown urban renewal tnd redevel-